The Spanish Holocaust (91 page)

On 29 May 1937, in a parallel initiative, Franco had named Marcelino de Ulibarri Eguílaz as head of the Delegation of Special Services. Its brief was to ‘recover all documentation related to secret sects and their activities in Spain found in the possession of individuals or official entities, storing it carefully in a place far removed from danger where it can be catalogued and classified in order to create an archive that will permit the exposure and punishment of the enemies of the fatherland’.
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Ulibarri, one of the most prominent Navarrese Carlists, had first met Franco in Zaragoza when he was Director of the General Military Academy. Ulibarri had also been instrumental in promoting the political career of Franco’s brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer, in the city. His nomination was a reward for the part that he had played in facilitating the docile acceptance in April 1937 by the Carlist movement of its fusion with the Falange within Franco’s single party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. The appointment was also in recognition
of the obsessive anti-Freemasonry that Ulibarri shared with Franco and, of course, with Father Tusquets. Ulibarri, long an admirer of Father Tusquets, became acquainted with his fellow anti-Masonic campaigner on his frequent visits to Franco’s residence in the Episcopal Palace in Salamanca. So fierce was his hatred of Freemasons and Jews that Ulibarri was known among his Carlist comrades as ‘the hammer of Freemasonry’.
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Within weeks, Ulibarri had set up the Office for the Recovery of Documents. With the Basque Country about to fall into Francoist hands, the ORD’s purpose was the systematic seizure and subsequent classification of captured documentation. This task was entrusted to a small group of specially selected Civil Guards. Ulibarri soon argued for the merger of the ORD with the Oficina de Investigación y Propaganda Antimarxista. The determination of the overbearing and authoritarian Ulibarri to centralize all such activities eventually led to a clash with Tusquets.

With the prospect of the fall of Santander and Asturias following on that of the Basque Country, Ulibarri called for the collection of the documentation to be speeded up to permit the greatest efficiency in the subsequent repression. He stated that, in the wake of each victory, the police had to be supplied with ‘the documents that indicate the guilt of those persons who are to be tried immediately’. After the victory at Teruel and the subsequent drive through Aragon towards the Mediterranean, huge opportunities were opening up. The desired departmental merger was formalized on 26 April 1938 when, as Minister of the Interior, Serrano Suñer issued a decree creating the Delegación del Estado para la Recuperación de Documentos (DERD). Its purpose was to gather, store and classify all documents emanating from political parties, organizations and individuals ‘hostile to or even out of sympathy with the National Movement’ in order to facilitate their location and punishment.
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The documentation gathered by the Judaeo-Masonic Section of the Military Information Service was passed over to the ORD in the immediate wake of the merger. However, in his efforts to centralize all information on Freemasons, Ulibarri also tried to make Tusquets hand over his personal archive and file-card system which had been swelled by material collected under the auspices of the SIM. Tusquets replied by denying that he had any material and claiming that his papers were in Barcelona. Eventually, however, it appears that Tusquets’s archive was put at the disposal of the DERD. Until the occupation of Catalonia in January 1939, Tusquets continued to work in a much reduced Judaeo-
Masonic Section within the Military Information Service.
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One of the most influential of Ulibarri’s staff was the policeman Eduardo Comín Colomer. In August 1938, all security services in the Francoist zone had been unified under the National Security Service headed by Lieutenant Colonel José Medina. One of its principal departments was the Investigation and Security Police, which in turn was divided into various sections. One of them, Anti-Marxism, consisted of three sub-sections, Freemasonry, Judaism and Publications. Comín Colomer was the head of both the Freemasonry and Judaism offices, as well as producing the
Boletín de Información Antimarxista
. In January 1939, he was seconded to the DERD to be Marcelino de Ulibarri’s assistant. There he would play a key role in the classification and sifting of the captured material in preparation for its use by the secret police.
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The material would become the basis for his own legendary library and also for a stream of books and pamphlets published over the following thirty-five years in which he denounced all elements of the Republican left. During this time, one of his assistants was Mauricio Carlavilla.
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DERD search teams followed Franco’s troops as they moved across Aragon and into Catalonia. Barcelona was occupied on 26 January 1939 and placed under martial law the following day. DERD operatives started to search the city on 28 January and, by 7 June, had filled fourteen buildings with paper. Two hundred tons of documents were taken by train and truck from Catalonia to Salamanca. Eight hundred tons in total were gathered from all over what had remained of the Republican zone. With the help of the German specialists, this material was converted into a massive index of 80,000 suspected Freemasons, despite the fact that there had been nearer five than ten thousand Freemasons in Spain in 1936 and that fewer than one thousand remained after 1939. These files would facilitate the purges carried out in the 1940s under the infamous Special Tribunal created to implement the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism of February 1940.
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Ulibarri was named its first president on 1 September 1940 but was replaced soon afterwards by General Andrés Saliquet, who had presided over the repression in Valladolid.
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Tusquets’s labours bore fruit in that, in Franco’s Spain, to be considered a Freemason was to be guilty of treason. This often meant execution without trial. Before the end of 1936, thirty members of the Masonic lodge Helmanti of Salamanca had been shot. A similar fate awaited thirty members of the Masonic lodge Constancia of Zaragoza, fifteen in Logroño, seven in Burgos, five from Huesca, seventeen in Ceuta,
twenty-four in Algeciras, twelve in La Línea, fifty-four in Granada. All the Freemasons of Vigo, Lugo, A Coruña, Zamora, Cádiz, Melilla, Tetuán and Las Palmas were shot. The paranoiac exaggerations of the files accumulated in Salamanca meant that in Huesca, for example, where there were five Freemasons before the outbreak of war, one hundred men were shot after being accused of belonging to a lodge. As late as October 1937, eighty men in Málaga, accused of Freemasonry, were shot.
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In April 1938, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had contacted the Minister of Public Order, General Martínez Anido, to suggest widening the Spanish–German agreement on police co-operation. The Gestapo was interested in repatriating German Jews, Communists and Socialists who had fought in the International Brigades and been captured by Franco’s forces. The agreement signed on 31 July permitted the swift exchange of leftists caught by the two security services. International Brigaders were handed over to Gestapo interrogators stationed in Spain, then despatched to Germany without even minimal judicial procedures. Individual cases for repatriation required only the approval of Franco, which was never refused. In return, a programme of training for Franco’s political police was headed by SS Sturmbannführer Paul Winzer, the Gestapo attaché at the German Embassy in Salamanca. Martínez Anido died shortly before the end of 1938 and the functions of his Ministry were absorbed by the Ministry of the Interior. As his Director General of Security, Serrano Suñer appointed his crony José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní, the Conde de Mayalde. On Mayalde’s suggestion, Himmler was awarded the regime’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows in recognition of his role in the fight against the enemies of Franco’s Spain.
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Franco got his reward when, after the collapse of France, thousands of Spanish exiles fell into the hands of the Germans. On the very day, 22 June 1940, that the Franco-German armistice was signed in Compiègne, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed the French Embassy in Madrid that Azaña, Negrín and ‘other red leaders’ had requested visas to leave France for Mexico. Francoist efforts to extradite prominent Republicans from France would meet fewer problems in the German-occupied zone than in the territory of the newly established Vichy regime. Serrano Suñer requested that the French Ambassador, Le Comte Robert Renom de la Baume, inform the Vichy premier, Marshal Philippe Pétain, that Spain was impatiently waiting for France to ‘neutralize’ the Spanish red leaders currently in its territory. Then, on 24 July, the Spanish government asked the Comte de la Baume to prevent the departure for
Mexico of the seventy-four-year-old ex-Prime Minister, the conservative Manuel Portela Valladares, and several members of the Basque government.
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The Franco government’s interest in Portela’s extradition derived from his prominence in the lists of Father Juan Tusquets.

These requests were followed on 27 August by a peremptory demand for the extradition without delay of 636 prominent Republicans believed by the Madrid government to be in Vichy France. Underlying these requests was the threat that, if they were not met, Spain would use its special relationship with Nazi Germany to push its territorial claims to French North Africa. In any case, Marshal Pétain loathed the Spanish Republicans since he considered most of them to be Communists, but he was reluctant to breach the right of asylum. Accordingly, to the intense annoyance of Madrid, Vichy insisted that requests for extradition had to pass through the courts, in accordance with the Franco-Spanish extradition treaty of 1877 and a law of 1927 that required each case to be judged individually. Nevertheless, the Vichy French police, using names and addresses supplied by José Félix de Lequerica, Franco’s Ambassador, began to round up prominent Republicans, or at least place them under close surveillance. The French knew that to hand over these men would be to send them to certain death. Serrano Suñer was outraged that several, including Prieto and Negrín, had managed, with the collusion of the French authorities, to escape.
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On 1 July 1940, the President of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, informed his Minister Plenipotentiary in France, Luis Ignacio Rodríguez Taboada, that Mexico was prepared to accept all Spanish refugees currently in France. Moreover, he instructed him to inform the French government that, until their transport could be arranged, all Spanish Republicans in France were under the diplomatic protection of Mexico. On 8 July, Rodríguez Taboada was received by Pétain in Vichy. After warning him that the Spaniards were undesirables, Pétain agreed in principle. A joint committee was set up to work out the details and, on 23 August, an agreement was signed by the Mexican government and Vichy. Many Vichy officials viewed this arrangement with suspicion and they, and the Germans in the occupied zone, complied with Spanish requests for many Republicans to be prevented from leaving France. Nevertheless, the Mexican initiative helped thousands of Republicans until November 1942, when the German occupation of Vichy France severed diplomatic relations between the two.
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If the Francoist authorities were hindered by the judicial scruples of the Vichy French and the humanitarian efforts of the Mexicans, they had
no such problems regarding the Spaniards who found themselves in German-occupied France. In the days following the capture of Paris, groups of Falangists sacked the buildings in which various Spanish Republican organizations had their offices. Their funds and archives were seized and taken to Spain. Lequerica quickly established cordial relations with the Germans, who facilitated the activities of Spanish policemen within the occupied zone. The consequence was that the exiled Republicans’ places of residence were searched, their goods, money and documents seized and their persons mistreated even when they had not been arrested or extradited.

In late August 1940, the Conde de Mayalde visited Berlin to discuss the fate of the captured Republican refugees. He was shown the latest police installations and techniques and met Himmler and other top brass of the various German police and security services, including Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst. Himmler proposed that Spain and Germany exchange police liaison officers who would have diplomatic immunity and the right to arrest citizens of their respective countries. Himmler would thereby be able to increase the Gestapo network in Spain to maintain surveillance of German refugees and the Spaniards would get rapid access to Republican exiles. Mayalde said he would have to consult with his Minister but suggested that Himmler might like to visit Spain himself.

Even before that visit took place, as soon as France fell Franco and Serrano Suñer hastened to take advantage of Himmler’s earlier agreement with General Martínez Anido. Officers of the Dirección General de Seguridad were sent to Paris to arrange the extradition from occupied France of several recently arrested Republican leaders. The police attaché at the Paris Embassy, Pedro Urraca Rendueles, was in charge of securing their hand-over and taking them to the Spanish frontier. The Germans arrested prominent figures from lists provided by Lequerica including Lluís Companys Jover, the President of the Catalan Generalitat. On 10 July, in Pyla-sur-Mer, near Arcachon, German police, accompanied by a Spanish agent, had arrested Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Azaña’s brother-in-law, along with two close friends of the exiled President, Carlos Montilla Escudero and Miguel Salvador Carreras. The following day, two Socialists, Teodomiro Menéndez, one of the leaders of the Asturian miners’ insurrection of October 1934, and the journalist Francisco Cruz Salido, were arrested by the Germans in Bordeaux. On 27 July 1940, the Gestapo arrested in Paris the one-time editor of
El Socialista
and wartime Minister of the Interior Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta. All were handed
over to the Spanish police in France and taken to Madrid. There were no judicial procedures. According to Franco himself, the Germans delivered the prisoners ‘spontaneously’.
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